HOW THE SOUL IS SOLD

By Emily Yoffe;

Published: April 23, 1995

Thomas Moore, author of the unexpected best seller "Care of the Soul" and the subsequent and much expected best seller "Soul Mates," opens the workshop with a story about a call he got from someone at "Oprah" after his appearance on the TV show. "She wanted the names of people whose lives had been changed by my book," he says. "I said no. She said, 'Don't you want to change people's lives?' I said no. They won't be changed anyway. The person who says they're the most changed is the least changed."

For any of the 200 people in attendance who want to give it a shot anyway, at a table in the back is a display of the ways Moore is selling his souls. There is the handsomely boxed set of the two books, and separate hardcover, paperback and audio versions. For people who need a more specific approach on how not to change their lives, there is the $58, six-volume set of tapes titled "Soul Life," with cassettes on topics like "Introduction to Soul Life" and "Soul and the Family."

Moore finds it an exhausting business, this hawking of one's ideas to groups of people searching for an answer to -- well, searching for an answer. "Some people get energized by this," he says at the lunch break. "It wipes me out." Still, such events, this one held in a Manhattan church, are the price Moore pays to get his name before the kinds of people who will buy his books and tell their friends. A lot of friends. Since its publication in 1992, "Care of the Soul" has sold more than a million copies. And as people stream up to him during the breaks, he autographs his books with unfailing grace.

Events like this are also wearing for his collaborator at today's workshop, the psychoanalyst James Hillman. Hillman complains of a headache during the lunch break and after eating a sandwich, naps on the floor in a sleeping bag. For him, such workshops are not a means to propel himself onto the best-seller list. Though he is Moore's inspiration, the wellspring of the younger man's ideas, these workshops are the primary way he makes his living.

This Saturday's joint lecture, sponsored by the New York Open Center ($85 for members; $95 for nonmembers) is called "Aphrodite's Revenge: Dark Eros and Pink Madness." Over the course of the day the two men contemplate where to find the Greek goddess of love and sex in today's world, and how she retaliates for attempts to repress her. It is an abstruse topic, but Moore and Hillman, in their very different ways, make it vivid, perhaps even pertinent to those attending.

But there is something larger at work here than a meditation on a Greek goddess. It is a demonstration of how to package ideas. It is the difference between selling a million copies of a book and 35,000 (the total sales, after 19 years in print, of Hillman's major work, "Re-Visioning Psychology). It is why Moore is at ease on "Oprah" and Hillman will never be invited.

There is almost no distinction between Moore's ideas and Hillman's. Moore himself freely acknowledges his intellectual debt to Hillman. And he should. "Care of the Soul" can be seen in part as a gloss on Hillman's work, a clearer, more direct translation of Hillman's ideas. Call it Hillman Lite.

Hillman Heavy asks no less than to replace the governing beliefs of psychoanalysis. In Hillman's view psychology should be about depth, not growth. "After a certain age you do not grow," he has said. "If you start growing after that age, it's cancer." He has devoted decades to dethroning our culture's faith in the ego, to deflating our worship of heroic action and to deprecating our certainty in the concept of self. Hillman wants society to turn away from its obsession with the unanchored altitudes of spirit, and come back down to earth, to the soul. He also asks us to reject the judgmental thinking of monotheism and return our psyches to the polytheism exemplified by ancient Greece.

Hugh Van Dusen, who edits both Moore's and Hillman's books at HarperCollins, while celebrating the success of the former, regrets the obscurity of the latter. "It's sad but relevant that Hillman's books never sold very well. . . . It does seem that Tom has been able to take many of Jim's ideas and his own ideas and put them in a literary form that is widely accessible."

Their differences in style are no better illustrated than here at St. Peter's Lutheran Church. Moore, a former seminarian and therapist, has the gentle, reassuring manner of someone trained in gentleness and reassurance. He is 54 but is preternaturally young looking, his skin glowing and unlined. He doesn't so much lecture as evoke images of Aphrodite that seem to have just floated through his mind. These images suggest that each of us, in some of our most trifling moments, is in service to the goddess. He mentions associations with Aphrodite: flowers, smiles, gold. "Let's say you're walking down Madison Avenue and you're caught by a gold object -- that's so easy here. One of the great means we have of contemplation today is the store window."

When it is Hillman's turn to speak he doesn't evoke, he provokes. He is tall, thin, ascetic-looking at 69, with cropped white hair, a hawklike nose and deep creases across his temple which point like arrows to his penetrating sea-colored eyes. On stage, he is on the attack, working himself into a sweat, pacing, as he flips through a stack of stapled bits of paper. Hillman's subject is not beauty but pornography. His speech is about Aphrodite's reviled son, Priapus, the god best known for his grotesquely enlarged phallus, the god of exposure.